Will the last person to leave California please turn off the lights?

A January study by the American Petroleum Institute listed California’s gas taxes as second highest in the nation behind New York. After the July 1 tax increase, however, the 70.1 cents average tax per gallon will lead the nation.

Prices for regular gas in California are already among the highest in the nation. On Wednesday, the average price for a regular gallon of gas was $4.238, up from $3.69 a month ago. California’s prices are second only to Hawaii, the Auto Club reported.

This is basically happening because the Democrat-controlled legislature decided back in 2010 that they wanted to get their grubby little hands on money normally used for road projects, so they lowered the sales tax on gas but boosted the excise tax. How does this all work? Well, if this were a horror movie, you would be screaming at the screen because the characters were about to do something incredibly foolish that would get them all brutally murdered…

An excise tax is a tax on an individual product purchased, not based on the price. The publicly elected Board of Equalization must set the rate each year by March 1 so that the state generates the same amount of tax revenue it would have had it remained under the previous sales-tax system.

Dun Dun DHUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!!!

Taxable sales of gasoline in California have fallen from 15.9 billion gallons in fiscal year 2006 to 14.6 billion gallons in fiscal year 2012.

Yeah, you read that right. Nobody can afford to buy a product, so the brain trust that runs the state has set up the system so that taxes on that product have to go up. Cue the “Real Men of Genius” theme song.

The rest of you can go ahead and laugh, but you should probably bear in mind that this is likely a chilling glimpse of things to come in a country full of people stupid enough to re-elect Barack Obama.